The Washington Examiner’s Phil Klein reports that Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty may have an SCHIP problem:

Back in 2007, the newly-elected Democratic majority was in a pitched battle with the Bush White House over the renewal and expansion of SCHIP. Democrats saw it as a down payment on universal health care, but President Bush eventually vetoed the legislation, which raised tobacco taxes and expanded coverage to children from families with household incomes of up to $82,600.

As chairman of the National Governor’s Association at the time, Pawlenty came out in favor of the renewal and expansion of the law. His public statements at the time show a politician who was trying to thread the needle as governor of a liberal state who had future ambitions within the GOP. Though he endorsed the renewal and expansion, he didn’t say how big of an expansion he supported and didn’t specify the funding mechanism. Nor did he explicitly come out against President Bush’s veto.

Klein speculates that Pawlenty will likely argue that he was presenting the position of the NGA and did not endorse a specific funding mechanism (i.e. the tobacco tax) or any other details about how the expansion should occur.

That may be true, but Pawlenty hasn’t exactly shied away from expanding the government’s role in the health care system. In November of 2006 — at the beginning of his second gubernatorial term — Pawlenty said his administration has been “studying very diligently the Massachusetts model about how that would apply to Minnesota,” suggested expanding the state’s Medicaid program, and pledged to “move in stages” toward “universal coverage.” “Everyone should be in a health plan of some sort…but I think as a goal we should start with covering all kids,” he said.

Conservatives are already taking shots at his health care record. On Thursday, fellow Minnesotan Rep. Michele Bachmann (R) told radio host Laura Ingraham that Pawlenty’s health record “will concern the voters.” “We need to have people who have enough foresight and common sense to know these programs aren’t going to work,”she said.

Paul Krugman on why Medicare is comparatively more expensive than single-payer health programs in other nations:

What is true is that the U.S. Medicare is expensive compared with, say, Canadian Medicare (yes, that’s what they call their system) or the French health care system (which is complicated, but largely single-payer in its essentials); that’s because Medicare American-style is very open-ended, reluctant to say no to paying for medically dubious procedures, and also fails to make use of its pricing power over drugs and other items.

So Medicare will have to start saying no; it will have to provide incentives to move away from fee for service, and so on and so forth. But such changes would not mean a fundamental change in the way Medicare works.

It’s worth pointing out that the lawmakers who oppose the cost-containment measures Krugman describes are more inclined to fear monger and complain about Medicare’s “unsustainability” and increasing costs. So next time you see Republicans arguing that Medicare is going broke and won’t be there for future generations of Americans, recall that they all voted against, demagogued and proposed amendments to significantly limit the application of comparative effectiveness research in Medicare — so that the program is not paying “for medically dubious procedures” — during the health care reform debate and are now leading the charge to repeal the ACA’s Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB).